SOURCE: "Narrative Authority and the Controlling Consciousness in Fielding's Tom Jones," in her Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction, University of Georgia Press, 1992, pp. 65-82.

In the following chapter from her book Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction, Kraft examines the way in which authorial narrative interrupts and replaces the representation of the characters' consciousness in Tom Jones.

No one has ever seriously argued that there is no evidence of consciousness in Tom Jones. The narrator is clearly a thinking being, and throughout the introductory chapters we find ourselves as readers actively involved with the process of his thought.¹ When, in chapter I of book 11, Fielding says, "The Slander of a Book is, in Truth, the Slander of the Author" (2: 569), we are quite prepared to admit the personal identification. The personality of the "narrator" author so dominates the text that his imposing presence continually inserts itself...